I just got back last night from our vacation to the Bavarian Alps with the girls and haven't been able to get the launchers to properly open/work on either my Desktop or my Laptop. Has there been a bug anyone else has experienced in the last week? Here are my symptoms so far:

When I click on icon to open launcher there is like a 2 minute delay.

When the "launcher" finally shows up, it is just a black square in the middle of my screen.

If anyone has some troubleshooting tips to share let me know. I hope you are all doing real well and I'll try to post some photos of the trip soon.

UPDATE - Saturday February 14:
•Daybreak had connection issues overnight; forums are back up, but login may not be completely stable yet. It is being worked on.
•12:30pm ET: Smed, Holly and Emily (Domino) have all confirmed that there are DDOS attacks going on. They're doing what they can, but expect things to be unstable until it's mitigated.
•Holly posted a bit more this morning on the EQ2 forums, and twice on the EQ forums, both of which we've included after the jump.
•If you're unfamiliar with Holly, read this comment.

The attack is a Denial of Service attack. How these work is the hacker bombards a server with requests (like logging into the game). When we sign onto the game, we send one request with our login info and the server verifies us and lets us into the game. Denial of Service attacks send so many requests to the server all at once that the server cannot keep up with the bombardment and slows to a crawl (or crashes) as a result.

The hackers may not be sending login requests (there are many ways an DoS attack can be executed. I just used logging in as an example.)

Regardless, until Daybreak finds where the attackers are sneaking into the system and blocks it, we are dead in the water.